Wikipedia:Citation shotgunning
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Citation shotgunning is the practice of responding to – or starting – a discussion about article content by dropping a very long list of citations on to a talk page.
Generally, citation shotgunning occurs in the context of an article on a fringe topic in science or medicine: cold fusion, homeopathy, chemtrails, etc. A believer in the cause will arrive at an article and discover that Wikipedia's treatment of their pet theory is a little too straightforward and reality-based.
- "How can you say Bigfoot is just a combination of folklore and hoax? Here are seventy-three published articles that say otherwise!"
The articles will mostly be out of date, incomplete, low quality, published in dubious journals or news outlets, misrepresented, or just plain bad. The citations offered will generally be of appreciably lower quality than most of the citations on which the extant article is based.
It is rare that the wielder of the citation shotgun will have read all, or any, of the citations he presents. (At best, he may have skimmed an abstract here and there.) The – faintly ridiculous – expectation is that his opponents will go to the trouble of reading and responding to every single individual source.
Little or no specific description of each source is provided; it's not clear how each or any should apply to the question at hand, or how the citations should or could be used. The citations are often presented without a clear explanation of how they might be used in an article, or what article changes the editor is suggesting. Sometimes, a citation shotgun barrage is used to try to draw other editors into a general forum chat on a topic.
The lists are often copied and pasted – plagiarized – from other websites or mailing lists; credit is seldom given to the original author. Citations are often incomplete (sometimes as a consequence of the copy-pasting). Honestly, "Smith et al., 1974" is a bit hard to look up.
Important disclaimer
[edit]Citation shotgunning has nothing to do with shotgunning, the process of consuming an entire container of an alcoholic beverage extremely rapidly. (Though the material presented is often rather hard to swallow.)